Then I asked myself if she drew inspiration from other women photographers from South Africa. I wrote my master’s thesis on Candice Breitz, a South African photographer and video artist, and found that in her work she deals a lot with the representation of women. Meyerding: I did my masters at the Courtauld Institute of Art in a special option course on documentary photography, film, and video in contemporary art. Jason: How did you become interested in this history? The film is a collage of images and songs, interviews, filmed scenes, and photographs, recalling the 1956 Women’s March to the Union Buildings in Pretoria and its aftermath. I also decided to include a documentary, You Have Struck a Rock. Some of the ways in which I did this are the timeline, which you’ll encounter when entering the space, and a table and chairs, where you can take your time to read through different photobooks. Many of the resulting black-and-white images portray women and expose issues of intersectionality, which are moments where various social classifications such as race, gender, or class overlap, resulting in systemic oppression.Īpexart’s exhibition style doesn’t allow any captions to go directly with the works in the space, so it was clear to me that I needed to find other ways of contextualizing the photographs. On display is work created from the 1950s until the 1990s, which has been produced by Black and white women. So, in Defiant Visions, I wanted to foreground the work of largely ignored women photographers and showcase their vision of everyday life during apartheid. The title of the show is derived from Darren Newbury’s important 2009 book Defiant Images: Photography and Apartheid South Africa, which traces how photographers documented the violence that dominated anti-apartheid imagery-but this book focuses primarily on well-known male photographers. From the start, I wanted to make my research accessible to a larger audience beyond the small academic bubble.

Marie Meyerding: I was working on my doctoral thesis, which is on women and photography in apartheid South Africa.

Stefanie Qaba Jason: What prompted Defiant Visions? Mavis Mtandeki, UWCO Members at the Second Funeral of King Sabata Jonguhlanga Dalindyebo at Bumbane Great Place, Eastern Cape, October 1, 1989 Also included is a sweeping collection of Mavis Mtandeki’s images chronicling Black women’s lives in the period surrounding the country’s first democratic election in 1994.Įarlier this summer, I spoke with Meyerding about some of the artists gathered in the apexart exhibition and how their practices can help us make sense of apartheid, photography, and history-making at large. Meanwhile, Zubeida Vallie’s and Lesley Lawson’s photographs meditate on the quiet and more action-oriented moments of the 1980s, an era defined by increased resistance efforts against the state’s repression. The extensive and brutal forced removals of Black and brown people across South Africa are given nuance in Jansje Wissema’s 1970s account of District Six, a mixed-race community in Cape Town that was proclaimed as whites-only, resulting in the displacement of thousands of its residents. On view include a 1950s magazine archive spotlighting the biography and photography of Mabel Cetu, and Deborah May and Georgina Karvellas’s short documentary film You Have Struck a Rock(1981), about the 1956 Women’s March in Pretoria against pass laws for Black women. The exhibition covers the 1950s to the 1990s, a time marked by resistance campaigns, an emergent field of Black photojournalism, and the shift to democracy. It also exposes the effects of race, gender, and class structures on lives, namely Black women. The recent group exhibition Defiant Visions, curated by Marie Meyerding for apexart in New York, which closed in July but is still on view online, shines a light on the perspectives of women during apartheid, accentuating cracks in the archive and exposing new possibilities for these histories.ĭefiant Visions brings together five photographers and two filmmakers whose divergent accounts of apartheid magnify the intricacies of women’s everyday under white-minority and patriarchal rule. Bringing to bear the multiplicity of the country’s official records-as a space of opportunity but also omission-Peterson’s inquiry invites imaginative ways to redress fixed and obscure narratives that still linger. “How do we refigure the archives?” the late scholar Bhekizizwe Peterson once asked about the legacy of the colonial-apartheid memory project in South Africa today.

Defiance black light poster